Tabular Diffusion Counterfactual Explanations

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Zhang, Wei, Barr, Brian, Paisley, John
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914015249170432
author Zhang, Wei
Barr, Brian
Paisley, John
author_facet Zhang, Wei
Barr, Brian
Paisley, John
contents Counterfactual explanations methods provide an important tool in the field of {interpretable machine learning}. Recent advances in this direction have focused on diffusion models to explain a deep classifier. However, these techniques have predominantly focused on problems in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on tabular data typical in finance and the social sciences and propose a novel guided reverse process for categorical features based on an approximation to the Gumbel-softmax distribution. Furthermore, we study the effect of the temperature $τ$ and derive a theoretical bound between the Gumbel-softmax distribution and our proposed approximated distribution. We perform experiments on several large-scale credit lending and other tabular datasets, assessing their performance in terms of the quantitative measures of interpretability, diversity, instability, and validity. These results indicate that our approach outperforms popular baseline methods, producing robust and realistic counterfactual explanations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00876
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tabular Diffusion Counterfactual Explanations
Zhang, Wei
Barr, Brian
Paisley, John
Machine Learning
Counterfactual explanations methods provide an important tool in the field of {interpretable machine learning}. Recent advances in this direction have focused on diffusion models to explain a deep classifier. However, these techniques have predominantly focused on problems in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on tabular data typical in finance and the social sciences and propose a novel guided reverse process for categorical features based on an approximation to the Gumbel-softmax distribution. Furthermore, we study the effect of the temperature $τ$ and derive a theoretical bound between the Gumbel-softmax distribution and our proposed approximated distribution. We perform experiments on several large-scale credit lending and other tabular datasets, assessing their performance in terms of the quantitative measures of interpretability, diversity, instability, and validity. These results indicate that our approach outperforms popular baseline methods, producing robust and realistic counterfactual explanations.
title Tabular Diffusion Counterfactual Explanations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00876